1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to telecommunications systems and, in particular, to a system for routing and handling calls using personal rules.
2. Description of the Related Art
Some modern enterprise telecommunications systems can provide for monitoring and reporting the presence state of contacts on an enterprise user's contact list. Others allow users to specify handling of incoming telephone calls.
In such systems, the user can log in to a server and define rules, which are used to specify call handling procedures, such as whether the call is to be routed to a user's desk telephone, mobile telephone, voice mail, and the like. The server can further monitor user and device presence and availability states.
However, many enterprises that choose to make use of such an advanced telecommunications system already have in place legacy infrastructures and are reluctant to completely replace capital equipment. Consequently, adoption of new systems tends to occur relatively piecemeal, such that the new system and the legacy system both operate simultaneously.
As can be appreciated, the new advanced systems provide many features not available on the legacy system. It is nevertheless often desirable to provide as many features as possible to those users employing the legacy systems. However, in such advanced systems, typically all calls are routed through the server. Because all calls are routed through the server, network bandwidth can be adversely affected if a large number of legacy system related calls are received and routed through the server.